May I start with a personal reminiscence? Of all the truly great pianists, it is Alfred Cortot who has compelled me to reach frequently and greedily for his records, to re-experience once more his uniquely vital and recreative spirit or, more subjectively, ‘to sniff again the opium’ he discovered in Chopin (Daniel Barenboim).

My earliest listening years were dominated by Cortot’s 78s of Chopin and were comple -mented by hearing him in a recital given in Leeds Town Hall in 1953. Frail and virtually blind, Cortot stood on the stage and instead of a more familiar bow raised his right arm in what looked like a Papal blessing. Cortot was a man with a sense of occasion. His performance consisted of the 24 Études and 24 Préludes and even as a teenager I was aware of an undying vision and spirit that surfaced through the insecurities of the last and fallible years of his career. Already as an aspiring piano student I learnt an invaluable lesson, that there are higher goods than discretion, a quality or ether above and beyond a ‘correct’ or limiting accuracy.

Cortot recorded many of Chopin’s major and minor works several times. And although it is popularly thought that he was indifferent to ‘mistakes’, to smudges and inaccuracies, the perhaps inevitable result of a searing and uncompromising quest for Chopin’s inner voice and spirit (I am thinking of the title of his book, In Search of Chopin), he nonetheless saw such errors as painful and regrettable. At the same time, he was intent above all in coming to the heart of the matter, an elusive quest, a musical equivalent of the Holy Grail.

And it is in this sense that APR’s issue of recordings made chiefly in Paris but also in London, resurface like so much buried treasure. Once again you are made aware that if Cortot’s stress was on spontaneity (‘improvise, lose yourself’) it was complemented by no less remarkable rigour. He demanded written analyses of the works his ‘advanced class of 800 students’ were to play, and woe betide those who came insufficiently prepared.

APR’s issue may come under the heading ‘The French Piano School’, but if Cortot was inimitably a French pianist—his clarity, verve and elegance—he was no less inimitably himself. Cortot was important because he was Cortot above and beyond his nationality.

In the opus 10 and 25 Études you witness, even if with slight but telling differences of stress and emphasis, once more that crossing of the Rubicon, from pragmatism to poetry. From Cortot thirds, sixths, octaves etc are transformed beyond their meagre selves. Hear him in Op 10 No 1, that glorious curtain-raiser jestingly known as ‘the runaway chorale’, where his light and shade, his tonal chiaroscuro are a far cry from the more familiar unrelenting forte. His shot from guns virtuosity in No 4 occurs through a rhythmic propulsion at the heart of his playing, and when have you heard a more scintillating, delectably light-fingered, carefree bravura in No 5, the ‘Black Key’ Étude? In the slower Études (Nos 3 and 6 from opus 10, No 7 from opus 25), mistakenly thought (notably by officials on the competition circuit) an easy option, you hear more markedly than ever that ‘singing’ line, that cantabile for which Cortot was celebrated. You also note his rubato, a musical breathing with its characteristic pull back on the first beat of the bar, his expressive focus and intensity.

The eminent teacher Gordon Green used to play his students Cortot’s recording of the A flat Étude, Op 25 No 1, as a dream example of a freedom and fantasy and, again, of an inimitable cantabile. Singers can be notoriously critical of pianists, and I like to think of artists of the stature of Callas, Fisher-Dieskau and Gerard Souzy listening to Cortot, enthralled by a pianist who joins them in his capacity to sing and breathe the life of music. Again, hear Cortot in the central ‘più lento’ of the E minor Étude, opus 25 No 5, among Chopin’s most beguiling outpourings, and you will find the melody, enmeshed in soaring and dipping figuration, sung with all the artistry of a great singer. Significantly, Chopin was a lover of Bellini, of the bel canto tradition in opera.

APR’s issue of the ‘French’ 24 Préludes complements, though with differences in colour, nuance and inflection, Cortot’s other sets of the Études, Préludes and Waltzes. Does the second Prélude in A minor’s morbid ‘lento’ flow just that bit more easily if as evocatively as ever? Is the notoriously demanding sixteenth Prélude in B flat minor more intimidatingly ‘presto con fuoco’ in Cortot’s remorseless rhythmic propulsion, more, in Cortot’s words, a ‘ride to the abyss’? Cortot always encouraged such lovingly asked and mulled over questions.

In the more public and urbane world of the Waltzes, music in which for Edward Sackville-West, most elegant and perceptive of musical amateurs, ‘emotion is permitted to suggest itself through a veil of elaborate civility’, Cortot is in his element, illuminating every page, whether in the rollicking good humour of the G flat Waltz, Op 70 No 1, or in the introspection of Op 64 No 2 in C sharp minor, most elegiac of the Waltzes.

Then there is the B minor Sonata, the first of Cortot’s two recordings. The militaristic ‘maestoso’ opening is made fiercely rhetorical while the Scherzo, one of Chopin’s two benign examples of the genre, is as vivacious and ‘light as a hair bell’ as you could wish, but it is in the ‘Largo’ that Cortot shows his truest most remarkable colours, with his intricate weaving of melody and counter-melody a reminder that Chopin was never a right-hand composer, but one with his own distinctive polyphony. What triumph, too, what ‘wild release’ at the close of the finale’s ‘equestrian galop’.

The response to Cortot over the years has not been unmixed. I have already mentioned Daniel Barenboim’s telling brevity and hope we have moved on from Rachmaninov’s cold dismissal of Cortot (‘Cortot plays wrong notes’) or Cortot’s equally chilling dismissal of Rachmaninov—though he included the Third Concerto in his repertoire—(‘Rachmaninov is passé’). For some disapproving and contemporary pianists Cortot was part ‘of the age of the wrong note’ (Cécile Ousset). My own early teacher Ronald Smith was similarly troubled by a lack of precision, particularly in the Études: ‘They are studies, and I would like to hear rather more right notes.’ Per contra, and I think splendidly, for Yvonne Lefébure Cortot’s wrong notes were ‘the wrong notes of a God’.

More interestingly, Murray Perahia claims that he listens more to pianists of the past than the present, adding that if his playing of Chopin is of another generation from Cortot, he would like to think he continues something of his spirit. Ivan Moravec, checking my enthusiasm for Cortot, asked, ‘don’t you think that the ideal or ultimate glory comes when an instinct for poetry is combined with a flawless technical sheen?, his eye and ear on Michelangeli and Krystian Zimerman. And then, an anecdote: Philippe Entremont tells of a time when on tour and packing to leave for the airport, he turned on the radio and heard playing which left him transfixed. For him it seemed to fly, to take off into the stratosphere. ‘I was mesmerized and missed my flight!’

Finally, it is surely pertinent to quote Artur Schnabel, a pianist of a radically different persuasion. Questioned by a producer concerning his inaccuracy in the massive octave outbreak in the opening ‘maestoso’ of Brahms’ D minor Concerto he replied: ‘I could play it more accurately, but I couldn’t play it more brilliantly.’ Claude Frank, who studied with Schnabel, faced with mention of inaccuracies and tele scoped phrases remarked, ‘but you see his technique was so brilliant’, again, a reminder of the priorities of two great pianists.

Cortot’s protean and multi-faced life as a musician, as pianist above all, but as conductor, teacher, author and editor, allowed him little time for systematic daily practice yet he always allowed a space for his love of wonder and the picturesque. Can you feel quite the same after reading him on Variation 9 from Fauré’s Theme and Variations, ‘a dark lifted ecstasy, where the high G sharp, the curve of the melody, the heart sinks down like a star in the evening’?

Arguably, more intensive practice, while it might have improved accuracy and stability, might also have blunted something of his fervour, his desire to let go. How hard it is, too, to think of him listening back to test pressings, then correcting this mishap and that, above all, making the subconscious conscious.

Finally, Cortot was a virtuoso in the fullest Lisztian sense, one ‘called upon to make emotion speak and sing and sigh, he must call up scent and blossom and breathe the breath of life’. Few have confirmed Liszt’s plenitude more generously. Cortot was indefatigable. In his own words: ‘I can never have enough of it.’ Small wonder that the Japanese relinquished their love of accuracy above all to present Cortot with an island which they named Cortotshima (‘hermit in the island of dreams’).

It only remains for me to thank APR for the opportunity not so much to reassess as to re-experience Cortot’s artistry.

Bryce Morrison © 2025

There’s a good case for claiming Cortot as the greatest of twentieth-century French pianists and he was certainly the most prolific one to record in the 78-rpm era. Though he was accompanist in eight G & T discs featuring Félia Litvinne as early as December 1902, his first solo recordings were made for Victor in the USA in 1919. Thereafter, he was to record prolifically throughout the 78 era and into the early days of LP in the 1950s. Throughout his life he only recorded for Victor and HMV (The Gramophone Company, later EMI). These two companies had reciprocal agreements whereby Victor titles were distributed in Europe by the Gramophone Company and HMV titles were distributed in the Americas and Japan by Victor. The Gramophone Company had a strong presence in France and a major recording operation there (the HMV brand being known as La Voix de son maître) but strangely, apart from the recordings included on these CDs, none of Cortot’s over one hundred solo recordings was made in France, though a few chamber and orchestral works were. After the earliest years of Victor’s US recordings, the vast majority being made at HMV’s studios in the UK.

Of course, for Cortot, living in France, World War 2 changed everything. He could no longer travel to the UK, or anywhere other than occupied Europe, and it would appear this must have prompted him to re-record much of his Chopin repertoire, even though the same music had often been recorded less than a decade before in HMV’s Abbey Road studios. What is even more surprising is that the Études, Préludes and Waltzes presented here are only the tip of a recording iceberg, for in addition to these published titles Cortot also recorded the four Ballades, the four Scherzi, the four Impromptus, the seven mature Polonaises, Sonatas 2 and 3 and the Fantasy, Berceuse, Barcarolle and Tarantelle. Unfortunately, it appears none of these unpublished recordings has survived. While we have alternative versions for much of this repertoire, the loss of these cycles of Scherzi and Polonaises is particularly to be regretted as many of these pieces were not otherwise recorded.

As the existence of these wartime recording sessions is little known, it seems worthwhile to list them here. All recordings were made in Studio Albert, Paris. Where a recording is listed with a ‘begun’ date Cortot revisited the work at a later session to try further takes.

The unpublished Paris recordings 1942-1943
Piano Sonata No 3 in B minor, Op 58 – matrices 2LA 3907/14 – begun 7 December 1942
Ballade No 1 in G minor, Op 23 – matrices 2LA 4000/1 – begun 5 March 1943
Ballade No 2 in F major, Op 38 – matrices 2LA 4002/3 – begun 5 March 1943
Ballade No 3 in A flat major, Op 47 – matrices 2LA 4004/5 – begun 5 March 1943
Ballade No 4 in F minor, Op 52 – matrices 2LA 4006/7 – begun 5 March 1943
Piano Sonata No 2 in B flat minor, Op 35 – matrices 2LA 4010/15 – begun 5 March 1943
Scherzo No 1 in B minor, Op 20 – matrices 2LA 4034/5 – 14 March 1943
Scherzo No 2 in B flat minor, Op 31 – matrices 2LA 4028/9 – 14 March 1943
Scherzo No 3 in C sharp minor, Op 39 – matrices 2LA 4030/1 – 14 March 1943
Scherzo No 4 in E major, Op 54 – matrices 2LA 4032/3 – 14 March 1943
Polonaise No 1 C sharp minor, Op 26 No 1 – matrix 2LA 4044 – 30 April 1943
Polonaise No 2 E flat minor, Op 26 No 2 – matrices 0LA 4046/7 – 30 April 1943
Polonaise No 3 A major, Op 40 No 1 – matrix 2LA 4045 – 30 April 1943
Polonaise No 4 C minor, Op 40 No 2 – matrices 0LA 4052/3 – 30 April 1943
Polonaise No 5 F sharp minor, Op 44 – matrices 2LA 4048/9 – 30 April 1943
Polonaise No 6 A flat major, Op 53 – matrices 0LA 4054/5 – 30 April 1943
Polonaise Fantasy in A flat major, Op 61 – matrices 2LA 4050/1 – 30 April 1943
Barcarolle in F sharp minor, Op 60 – matrices 2LA 4110/1 – 7 July 1943
Fantasy in F minor, Op 49 – matrices 0LA 4112/5 – 7 July 1943
Impromptu No 1 in A flat major, Op 29 – matrix 2LA 4146 – 10 September 1943
Impromptu No 2 in F sharp major, Op 36 – matrices 0LA 4147/8 – 10 September 1943
Impromptu No 3 in G flat major, Op 51 – matrix 2LA 4149 – 10 September 1943
Fantasy Impromptu in C sharp minor, Op 66 – matrix 2LA 4150 – 10 September 1943
Three Écossaises, Op 72 No 3 – matrix 2LA 4151 – 10 September 1943
Berceuse, in D flat major, Op 57 – matrix 2LA 4152 – 10 September 1943
Tarantelle in A flat major, Op 43 – matrix 2LA 4153 – 10 September 1943

We will probably never know why Cortot, or his record company, chose not to issue so many of these recordings, though it’s worth noting that of those issued, the Waltzes in particular show signs of having been recorded in a hurry (all but two sides are first takes with some careless mistakes left in). Nevertheless, 80 years on, what a pleasure it would be to hear Cortot in some of the repertoire which was otherwise unrecorded. Let’s hope some test pressings may still turn up.

Finally, as we have already noted, Cortot liked to revisit repertoire he had already recorded. As a filler we have included one such example from his London sessions. The recording of Chopin’s third Piano Sonata included here, was Cortot’s first, made in the Small Queen’s Hall in May 1931. Only two years later, in July 1933, Cortot re-recorded the work in the new, state of the art, Abbey Road studios, and it is this later version which has been continuously reissued. But this earlier version is in no way inferior and could be argued to be better in parts that the 1933 version. It is also in very good sound for its time. We are happy to give it some well-deserved attention.

Michael Spring © 2025